FlyPaper Poetry
Issue IX
Winter 2018/2019
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TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Haley Morton [Featured Poet]
Aubade with Lesbian Petroglyph
Ode to an Empty Mouth
All New Things Start On September 3rd
Ishanee Chanda Synoynm Lip Manegio
conversation between gerard way and my dysphoria
Jordan Faber
origin & conduction
Madeleine Haas
How to Take the Edges from a Circle
Breia Gore
Apartment Complex
Catherine Garbinsky
THERE’S ROSEMARY THAT’S FOR REMEMBRANCE
Leah Mueller Skeleton D.A. Powell Sneak Albert Lee [奶奶 still plucks the zither thirty years after the Wah Mee massacre]
FEATURED POET:
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Haley Morton Haley Morton is currently a student in the MFA program at the University of South Florida. Her focus is on poetry, however, she has been published in Hobart with a flash fiction piece, as long as previously being published with poetry in Flypaper Magazine. Haley’s work is focused largely on the experience of women and the way they view their own bodies, she also has an obsession with religion that creeps its way into nearly everything she writes, for better or for worse. Haley currently lives in Tampa, Florida.
Aubade with Lesbian Petroglyph
I am going to use the word love now, because I think I’m ready: I loved the picture her body made, shadowed like petroglyph against my closed eyelids. She held the ends of me and we stretched and contracted: mouthy, covered in the golden sweat of coming morning and answered questions. My skin taut: like drum beats, sung only at flesh on skin, on flesh, on skin of whose name I will never say out loud.
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Ode to an Empty Mouth
Cockless, unentered by stomach bile, all spit swallowed, no one tonguing or coming. Now a bell: rings at the slap of a tongue, one tongue, slinking away, flattened out, pressed desperately to teeth. Tongue I should chop out if dedicated to this cause. Tongue that sings to nothing. Tongue wrapped around nothing. Tongue I refuse.
All New Things Start On September 3rd when the sky is wildest in Florida, windows boarded up, ceilings falling in and the only thing still living outside is wind howling for trees. When upper lips are dotted with salt, when there’s too many clouds to pick out animals and we look for shapes in sweat stains, with humidity like dog spit to our necks, when trees uproot to let wind sing through roots, when everything’s baptized daily in heavy air beading down our faces. When we are most human. When God is big and hungry and dunking his arm in the ocean. That’s when we move again.
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MORE POETS: Jordan Faber
Jordan Faber is a writer based out of Chicago, IL. Her fiction has most recently appeared in TIMBER, Lunch Ticket and is forthcoming in Dream Pop Journal. Her work in theater has been produced at The Greenhouse and Victory Gardens theaters in Chicago. Jordan received a BA in Creative Writing from Knox College and an MFA from Northwestern University, where she earned a Princess Grace Award nomination. She has worked for Black Spring Press in London and in development for the Sundance Channel. www.jordanfaber.com
Madeleine Haas
Madeleine Haas is an Ohio native studying sociology and political science at Ohio State University. This is her first publication, and she enjoys writing about things that make her feel any intense emotions — from art to rats to acrobats. When she’s not being dramatic for her poetry, Madeleine writes and performs sketch comedy.
Breia Gore
Breia Gore is an Asian-Pacific American poet living in South Carolina attending the University of South Carolina where she is pursuing a BA in English concentrated in Creative Writing and minor in film studies. Gores work has been published or is forthcoming in Lithium Magazine, Adolescent Content, Concept Literary, and Dirty Paws Press. She strives for education reforms in the arts through Teach For America and aims to create her own literary magazine to encourage youths to stay community-engaged and politically active. When she isn't stumbling over rough drafts or pointing out small animals on walks, she can be found drinking tea and organizing her pens.
Catherine Garbinsky
Catherine Garbinsky is a writer, a witch, and a worrier living in Northern California. She holds a degree in The Poetics of Transformation: Creative Writing, Religion, and Social Justice from the University of Redlands. Catherine’s chapbook of Ursula Le Guin erasures, All Spells Are Strong Here, is part of the Ghost City Press 2018 Summer Series. Her work has been featured or is forthcoming in L’éphémére Review, Rose Quartz Journal, Venefica Magazine, Cauldron Anthology, and others.
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Lip Manegio
Lip Manegio is a queer, trans nonbinary performance poet currently based in Boston where they are working towards a BFA in creative writing at Emerson College. Their work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Winter Tangerine, Freezeray Poetry, Crab Fat Magazine, the minnesota review, & elsewhere. They were a member of the 2018 Emerson CUPSI team, a finalist at the 2018 Capturing Fire International Queer Poetry Slam & Summit, and are an organizer for the Emerson Poetry Project.
Leah Mueller
Leah Mueller is an indie writer from Tacoma, Washington. She is the author of two chapbooks, “Queen of Dorksville” (Crisis Chronicles Press) and “Political Apnea” (Locofo Chaps) and three books, “Allergic to Everything”, (Writing Knights Press) “Beach Dweller Manifesto” (Writing Knights) and “The Underside of the Snake” (Red Ferret Press). Her work appears in Blunderbuss, Summerset Review, Outlook Springs, Crack the Spine, Atticus Review, Your Impossible Voice, and many other magazines and anthologies. She was a featured poet at the 2015 New York Poetry Festival, and a runner-up in the 2012 Wergle Flomp Humor Poetry contest.
D.A. Powell
Born in Albany, Georgia, D. A. Powell earned an MA at Sonoma State University and an MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His first three collections of poetry, Tea, (1998), Lunch (2000), and Cocktails (2004), are considered by some to be a trilogy on the AIDS epidemic. Lunch was a finalist for the National Poetry Series, and Cocktails was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry. His next two books were Chronic(2009), which won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys (2012) won the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry.
Albert Lee
Albert Lee is terminally saucy. Catfished from Honolulu, Hawai'i with a disgustingly generous financial aid package, he is currently a sophomore at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota. When his Bipolar II disorder isn't forcing him to bake red velvet cookies at 2:47 am or marathon 13 Reasons Why for nine hours straight, he obsessively works on a book of poetry about mass shootings in America. Why? Because you probably can't name five people, if any, who have died in a mass shooting in the past twenty years. #MakeAmericaCareAgain
Ishanee Chanda
Ishanee Chanda is a prose writer and poet from Dallas, Texas. She has been published on Thought Catalog, the Huffington Post, the Eckleberg Project, Z Publishing House’s Texas's Emerging Writers: An Anthology of Fiction, and Stoked Words: An Anthology of Queer Poetry. She has also published a book of poetry Oh, these walls, they crumble. Ishanee enjoys throwing glitter at people, eating her weight in Thai food, and singing loudly (and badly) to Taylor Swift.
Edited by: J. David, Geoff Anderson, Zackary Lavoie, Crystal Ignatowski Photography: Will Pounder
Synonym Ishanee Chanda
overflow • deluge • flash flood • overabundance • cataclysm • tragedy • tsunami • don’t leave me • spillover • plethora • please stay • engulf • overrun • i want to love you • inundate • swamp • please love me back • even if it is the last thing you do • overwhelm • drench • say something • i’m sorry • avalanche • barrage • torrent • kissing you is like knowing how the desert craves rain • submerge • liquidate • Niagara • i don’t know how to stop loving you after you leave • i don’t know how to start loving myself since you never gave me a chance • suffocate • stifle • you never gave me a chance, sweetheart, never held your breath long enough • obliterate • exterminate • annihilate • i promise i’ll keep this love to myself • what else do i do with it • at least this way • the only person who drowns here is me
conversation between gerard way and my dysphoria Lip Manegio (in which the part of gerard way is played by erasures of his own lyrics) I never thought it’d be this way Just me you, we’re here alone And if you stay, all I’m asking for is A thousand bodies You’re running afterafter something If this is what you want Then fire at will No I mean this every single day So go if you can’t burn inside
If all my enemies threw a party Would you light the candles? Would you drink the wine And sell your arteries And buy my casket gown -
i only ever asked for one body, one that lets me breathe right, and i guess i’ll chase it if i have to
& you do know a fire can’t burn without fuel right & i’ve been twisting ember since i started sprouting & became a shape that couldn’t imitate you anymore you walk around in all that effortless androgyny how could you not think that you were feeding something -
don’t pretend the smolder is a threat, how could you even know this heat through all that skin -
How I’m a total wreck and almost every. Like the firing squad or the mess you made, Well, don’t I look pretty walking down the street. In the best damn dress I own?
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If you were here I’d never have a fear.
you say We are young and we don’t care. (oh whoa ow) Your dreams and your hopeless hair r. (oh whoa ow) We never wanted it to be this way -
have you heard yourself lately you sound just like my mother bringing up my age do you want to see all the hair shed into bathroom sinks the dye spent on this shock do you know how much i’ve bled do you want me to show you this body’s hips do you want to see the scars do you know Well, Mother, what the war did to my legs and to my tongue, You should’ve raised a baby girl, I should’ve been a better son, If you could coddle the infection They can amputate at once. You should’ve been tell me again all the things i should have been about how i have torn things so far apart and then tell me how i should’ve been better what do you know I think you’re beautiful, too Get up, get out, and be social, We can’t pretend we won’t go You rise in your heart when you’re breathing, So I think I might go Just breathe in and blow, It’s awful, you know, When we dream we all shake, I think he’s in love With what you’re thinking of, It’s liveable, Grey hairs are visible, I’m kind of miserable, too i get it you think you understand this rot but you move with all that swagger in your hips in a bulletproof vest how could you hurt what proof do you have You got blood on your money You got some mud in your eye. I meanthis every single day So go if you can’t burn inside ‘Cause the world don’t need Another hopeless cause -
(You don’t know a thing about my sin
too late the drip already started don’t you know i try to find you in every reflection do you know how many mirrors i’ve blotted myself out of?
I’ll give you all the nails you need, Cover me in gasoline, And would you pray for me? (You don’t know a thing about my sins make a saint of me? (You don’t know So I’m burning I would you make a martyr of the way i die in so many people’s mouths listen i wish i could stop the scorch but what do you want me to do Trust, you said Who put the words in your head And we can settle this affair If you would shed your yellow tak gravity please understand it has to be this way
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origin & conduction Jordan Faber
I. you woke pulling tacks from your back, feathers drifting out the doorway whispering, sad people begin at isometric relaxation and leave each other there. bleed out histories with our hands, moths wings, fluttering through each others veins hemophiliacs now, sheets tied around years and minutes, folding each other to rectangles and squares, stain dried origami hearts we drop each other to paper rivers, foiled sun dabbling over green glass rapids with no sound; “let us, let it� we say floating down stream face up. folding into new ghosts
How to Take the Edges from a Circle The words unspoken in Gustav Klimt’s “The Kiss”
Madeleine Haas
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I know your favorite color is yellow. I know this because everything you touch turns to gold. At night, when desperate bones gasp for air, I turn my gaze to the stars and hold all the parts of my body I want you to kiss. I try to spin them into gold but my desire demands deeper hues, sings bruises into my sides in reds and blues. They linger, color wheels behind closed eyes, pushing knees into russet earth, and for the first time I can feel rose petals rush from my body. My body unearthly. My body celestial. My body gilded, at last. I cannot bring gold to the concentric circles weaving red and blue into my body. These lungs heave nothing but plum, violets in braided, bent clouds. Spun gold. Your favorite color. Perhaps I dig russet holes pleading – I have put myself down hoping you will move me to ascend. My knees in earth. Like me, they forget they are whole.
Apartment Complex Breia Gore
I begin the day with my head on a stake. Drink water for three hours and pretend to walk around the block. Cut off all my hair and move to Savannah with red wine and borrowed money. Make it big. Forget to shower. Move back to to the apartment complex, where people fold laundry and let the day spill past them like a naked gaze. Stuff my insides with oats and honey. Pretend to fold laundry like everyone else. Cry after calling my parents. Cry hard enough on the hardwood floor that my knees clink together. Push the door in the neighbors face when he knocks and asks me to keep it down. Think how suspicious it is that other people have nothing to think about. Think about the ignorance of that thought. Clean the floor. Clean the bathroom counters. Clean until it becomes suspicious. I cannot smell like kitchen sinks forever. Put on a record. Something light. Something live. Tell my boyfriend he is all I think about. Hate myself for lying to my boyfriend and telling him he is all I think about. Ask myself where my sense of community is. Where is the light? Why can I not find it?
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THERE’S ROSEMARY, THAT’S FOR REMEMBRANCE Catherine Garbinsky Skin too thin, like silk against a rush of wind. A heart, large and beating outside of yourself. Some people say that is what motherhood is like: a heart outside of your body. I did not give birth to you, but there you were. My heart. I do not know what delicate breaths were yours, what you felt in your mother’s arms. I heard your mother’s voice after you were gone, felt the hollow space you left in it. I see you in your brother’s smile, and in his curls -lighter than yours, but ringing sweetly around like a halo, and in the holy moments when he laughs, I hear you like an echo. I hold you in my dreams at night, and we dance against the stars, and I rock you in the crook of the crescent moon. We watch Spring returning, the unstoppable motion of time, and laugh at the logic of pollen as we sneeze among the wildflowers and the honeybees. When I wake, I will gather a bouquet for you, and rest it beside your grave.
Skeleton Leah Mueller
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Last glimpse of me on your bed, smiling as you stood in the doorway. The previous night, your hands on my spine, searching the spaces between vertebrae. The x-ray screen showed intersections where our bones tried to fuse together but failed. Somebody else’s photo hangs on the wall beside mine, her vertebrae spaced wide. Each furious bone breaking, independent of the other. The gap between fingers and body swells, until our map is lost. No trace. I keep driving. There is no direction to go but home. My bones fit the mattress there. Your eyes stare back from the windshield: empty skull pockets pasted with someone else’s face.
Sneak D.A. Powell
when away he would call every day and when he didn’t he was knocking on someone else’s back gate
oh, but he was hung like a trojan horse
with no trojan
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[奶奶 still plucks the zither thirty years after the Wah Mee massacre] after 李端 and Layli Long Soldier Albert Lee
I 1 play 2 the wrong notes 3 on the zither 4 in order to 5 gain 6 someone’s 7 attention
1 don’t know why we continue to 2 along with America’s addiction to apathy as if we’re afraid of 3 in the wrong setting and the wrong ending with the wrong grandmother 4 who plucks and plucks the butterfly’s song at dusk 5 find the gunshot that killed her unborn caterpillar of a human and maybe 6 enough courage to gamble the forsaken chrysalis forged in 7 solitude how it disintegrates in turpentine oil and white